THERE CAME A TIME when I could no longer walk. Between torment and starvation, I had nothing left, and lay upon the stone floor of my cave cell. Half the skin of my thighs had been peeled away, and the nails of my left hand torn off. My universe had become one of damp agony, my only experience a dull, numb ache. The memory of my betrayal burned in me, a black shame deep as any pain.

Lying in the dark, I saw once more the titanic forms of the statues carved in the great hall of the Dhar-Iagon. The Caihanarin, the Watchers in all their supernatural horror. Syriani had said its gods were the only true things—the only truth. If it is so, then the truth is hideous. I heard the flap of their time-eaten wings about the fringes of my mind, felt the pressure of their obscene eyes questing, searching.

Kharn Sagara said there were other things in the dark of our universe, things greater than the Cielcin. Kharn had known, must have known just what monumental gods his Cielcin clients worshiped—and why. And Syriani had spoken of the Watchers like living things. Not gods such as Jupiter or Jehovah—stories told by our ancestors of old—but xenobites. In the darkness, I saw again the image of Syriani leading its army across the stars, just as I had seen it in Calagah when I was a boy. I saw a shadow fall and drown the stars, and knew what then had cast it.

I forgot to move, forgot almost to breathe, forgot even that I was a man. No stir of air was there in the lamplit dark of that cave, and the only sound save that of my ragged and shallow breathing was the distant splashing of the fish.

It was so quiet.

Nothing moved.

“Find us,” came the familiar voice. “Find us in you.”

I turned my head to look around, but there was no one there. That was just as well, for it had been my own voice . . . and a memory. I turned my head aside, looked toward the water. It was possible—almost possible—to imagine that it was the same water that pooled beneath the palace of the Undying on Vorgossos, the lost and sunless sea where Brethren dwelt imprisoned and enslaved. Seek hardship, the daimon had said to me, relying on its computational vision of the future.

I had found it, and it had broken me.

With a titanic effort I managed to roll onto my belly, and with my ruined hands I began to crawl toward the water. To drink? To drown? I cannot say, can only remember the dry scrape of stone on my naked skin. I was not a man anymore, but a rough beast, a crawling shadow. I collapsed, face pressed against the cool, pale stone. Not far. Not far enough. Grunting, I pushed myself up, feeling the torn nails tear again and weep blood and pus.

It was not a face that stared back at me from the surface of that black pool, only the rough impression of one made by an artist with only the faintest knowledge of who Hadrian Marlowe once had been. My hair fell in curtains, and might have reached my elbows if I stood, and though it had not fallen out, the shock and deprivation had bleached it white in places, in tangled and uneven streaks.

I touched the fierce white scar that ran across my temple from the forehead above my right eye almost to my ear, using my three-fingered right hand. The Emperor’s ring was gone. When had I lost it?

I remembered only slowly. Even that first humiliation on the wall above the gates of the Dhar-Iagon was so remote a memory. Had I ever truly lived another life? Had Hadrian lived at all? I must have done. I shut my eyes and collapsed once more, rolling onto my back, my hair soaking in the freezing waters that ran through secret ways down from the caul of ice that englobed that frozen world.

“How far you’ve fallen.”

The voice that spoke was cool, bright and feminine.

“Valka?” She’d come for me, somehow, just as I knew she would. But the face that hove into view above me was Mandari, not Tavrosi. My heart—which had absurdly swelled the moment before—deflated all at once. “You.”

Severine’s smooth face frowned. “I shudder to see you in such circumstances.”

“Spare me,” I rasped.

“No, I mean it.” The MINOS woman looked down her nose at me. “You were great once. A hero to many.”

I shut my eyes. I had to listen to her. I did not have to see. “Some hero.”

To my astonishment, Severine did not rise to the bait. She was silent a long time, so long I thought she had left me, or else that she had been yet another hallucination, another figment of my fevered mind. “Hadrian Marlowe,” she said at last, savoring the words. I cracked my eyes, found her sitting on the rations crate. “Sir Hadrian Marlowe. Royal Knight. Hero of Aptucca. Demon in White . . .” She rattled these monikers off with the air of a bored schoolteacher. They sounded hollow in the dead air, false.

False.

“They call you Halfmortal,” she said. “They say you cannot be killed.”

I did not say anything, and let the silence stretch on. It was a trick I’d learned from the Emperor, from Kharn Sagara, from my own father. Say nothing, and the other man says all.

“It is true?” Severine asked, right on cue. “The Prince seems to believe it.” Still, I said nothing, permitting Severine to work herself up. I wish I could say I did it deliberately, that I was in control enough of myself to have any real agency in this conversation, but there was so little of me left. “I was not at Berenike, but I saw the footage. You should have been blown to atoms.”

Her words hung in the air like smoke, but still I lay there, eyes fixed on the roof above my head, on the gnarled fingers of limestone descending drop by glacial drop like slow hands. One such drop struck the water near my head.

“Were you trying to drown yourself, my lord?”

My eyes flickered to her face. Her features were . . . wholly forgettable, lacking the Lothrian pallor and polish of Iovan or the inhuman qualities of Urbaine. She would have been totally at home in the retinue of some Wong-Hopper Director or similar executive. She picked at a spot on one pant leg and flicked it irritably away. I felt an indecent flush at the thought that I had irritated her. It had been so long since I’d struck any sort of blow for myself. It had begun to feel as if I did not exist at all, as if the thing called Hadrian were some eidolon, some phantasm without agency or voice.

“I am going to die,” I said in answer.

“Yes,” the Extrasolarian agreed. No denial, no comfort in that coldly feminine voice. “Dorayaica will offer you to the others as proof of its power. He will be Aeta ba-Aetane. King of Kings.”

“I thought it already was.”

Severine examined her nails, apparently bored by this line of questioning. “He has made his claim. Your death . . . may cement it.” She let her hand fall, gray eyes flicking back to my face. “How did you survive that blast?”

“I dodged it,” I said, steeping venom on my words. “How do you think?”

“Don’t make me hurt you, my lord,” she said, steel showing from beneath her velvet exterior.

I very nearly laughed. “It’s a little late for that.”

“On the contrary,” she countered, “it is never too late.” Severine stood and crossed the floor to stand over me, hard soles clacking on the limestone. “Now answer me.”

I only stared at her.

The witch’s eyebrows drew up and together, and she stepped over me and began pacing along the water’s edge, her shadow flickering huge against the walls of the cave by the light of the lonely glowsphere. “I have been studying you ever since Lord Vati brought you here. Your genome, your . . . tissue samples, your neurological scans.” She turned, luminous gray eyes peering down at me. “Certain parts of your brain fire faster than almost anything I’ve seen. I’ve seen slower computers.”

“I don’t understand . . .”

“What are you?” Severine asked. I could feel her flat, metallic eyes dissecting me, examining every inch of my torn body, as if she thought to read her answer written in my scars. “You’re not a chimera—the only thing artificial about you are those bones. What then? Some . . . Imperial experiment? A homunculus?” When I did not answer her, she pressed on. “You’re not Choir work. I’d recognize the Chantry’s genetic markers anywhere. Who then? Vorgossos?”

I could only stare at her.

“Speak, damn you!”

“And say what? I don’t—ah!” I had tried to sit up that I might better see her, and the effort sent a spasm of pain cascading along my back. Muscles seized, and I lay back against the stone, teeth clenched as I waited for the pain to pass.

It vanished instead, blotted out as Urbaine had blotted it out in the pit.

When I opened my eyes, I found Severine staring down at me, her head cocked to one side. I could still feel the tension in my back—the tightness of cord and sinew—but the pain gone, as if hidden beneath an inch of purest snow. In her sweetest voice, Severine said, “Answer my question. Please.”

Moving with exquisite slowness, I forced myself to sit up, my long and sopping hair soaking through my grubby tunic. The pain gone for the moment, I became acutely aware of the meanness of my state: the layers of filth, the grease matting my hair, and the grotesque horror of my smell. The iron scent of blood mingled with the stench of fouler fluids and the musk of grime and unwashed flesh. I had hardly noticed it before. It had become a part of me, and a part invisible through the never-ending haze of pain.

“I am only what you see,” I said.

Severine’s eyes went glassy. “That is not an answer.”

What could I say that she would accept? That I had met a god—or something like a god—in some abstract time upon a mountaintop that did not quite exist? That it had shown me a vision of naked time and charged me to ensure its time came to pass? “I . . .” The sight of my mutilated nails transfixed me, the scabrous beds oozing pus. I rubbed at the white band of cryoburn scar on my left thumb with the three fingers of my right hand. “I have nothing to say to you, witch. You said it yourself: I am a dead man.”

Severine’s sweet smile only sweetened. “Why do you think I’m here?” She reached into a pocket of her white smock and drew out a small, black object about the size of an eyeglass case. “The Great One will kill you—that cannot be stopped—but it does not mean that you have to die, my lord. I can offer you a path.” She turned the black case over in her fingers. “Join us.”

“Join you?” I blinked up at her. “Are you mad?”

“Do you know who Minos was?” she asked pointedly. “You’re a student of antiquity, I understand.”

The tangential nature of her question rocked me back, and I braced myself on my maimed hands. “He built the labyrinth on Crete.”

“He was so much more,” she countered. “Mannus to the Germans. Manu to the Hindus. Manes to the Lydians and the Romans. Menes in Egypt. Adam in Canaan. He was the first king, the man from whom we get the word man itself. We are his successors. Continuing his work.”

“What work?” I asked incredulous. I was not aware of any connection between the mythical figures she’d named, though it was easy enough to hear the connection between the names themselves.

“Improving humanity,” she said. “Dragging us forward, up. Minos built civilization to separate us from the animals. We will make men like gods.”

“Iovan said the same,” I said, following the witch as she paced back and forth before me, the black case in her hands. “Syriani will not share its power. It uses you to attack us. When you are no longer useful, it will kill you. Depend on it.”

“Kill us?” Severine smiled. “Like you killed Urbaine?” I felt a damp coldness close over me. She’d scored a point, and she knew it. “We are not so easily destroyed!” She had stopped pacing and stood over me like a god. “You could live forever, never growing old. You could change your body, be what you always dreamed to be. And all this . . .” she gestured at the horrors her Cielcin masters had inflicted on me, “. . . all this could be washed away.”

Severine knelt on the stone before me, set the case pointedly at her right hand as she took my hands in her own. She was wearing thin, membranous gloves, like those of a surgeon. “We have your blood. A new body can be made ready—just like the one you’re wearing now. Syriani can have its sacrifice . . . and you can live again.”

I averted my gaze and—shaking my head—smiled. “Does your master know you’re here?”

“He doesn’t have to,” she said, fingers tightening over mine. “You are too valuable to waste. Your mutation . . . whatever it is . . . it changes everything.” She cocked her head again, and asked, “What do you see?”

“What?”

“The way your brain processes information, you must perceive time differently. Maybe even at the Planck scale.” Again, I could only stare. She was describing my vision of time. It made some sense: if what the Quiet had done to me was speed my perceptions of time, it might be that I saw time pass at a high enough resolution that I could see potential collapsing into reality as particles spun up or down. My silence had spoken for me, for Severine’s face lit. “You can, can’t you?” she paused, voice hushed. “That’s how you did it. That’s how you survived.” She drew a breath. “You did dodge it.”

She reached into another pocket of her smock and drew out a foil pack, which she opened and produced a sterile cloth. Reaching up, she dabbed at my forehead, washing off months of grime and dried blood. My skin stung from the alcohol, suddenly cold in the cool air. I didn’t stop her, and she set the cloth aside to take up her case, which she opened and drew out the black tab of an electrode. Without preamble, she reached up to stick the tab to my forehead.

I seized her wrist with one hand. “And if I refuse?”

“Then you die,” she said, her awe and smile faltering. “I have your blood. I don’t need you. I am offering you a chance to escape death.”

“Why?” I asked. “We’re enemies.”

“Petty morality!” Severine sneered. “We don’t need to be. We’re both fighting for the same thing. Fighting for humanity. For progress. You could join us. Live again.”

She tried to pull her hand away, but I held it fast. “What’s stopping you?” I asked, and looked away as if to hide my comprehension. She might have easily activated the collar again, subjected me to agony or crippled me to go about her work of stealing my mind. “Why offer me a choice?”

I could feel those flat, gray eyes searching my face. “The scan cannot be made if you resist it. If you fight it, you’ll corrupt the transcription.” She tried to free her hand and advance the electrode toward my face.

It took most of my remaining strength to shove her arm aside, but no thought, no consideration. “Go away.”

Severine did not shout, she did not argue. She only narrowed her eyes. “You’re making a mistake.”

It took all my will not to fall over. “Let me ask you something, doctor. If I accepted your offer, would I still be in this cell?” She blinked at me, confused by the obvious nature of the question. “Will I still die?”

The witch of MINOS was silent then for a long moment, studying my face. “Nothing can stop that.” She brandished the black case. “But if you let me map your brain, you can live again. I can do a complete synaptic scan and import the properties to a new host body. It will be as if you closed your eyes here and opened them . . . somewhere else.”

Distantly, the faint drip and trickle of water could be heard running down the rocks and stalactites to the great pool at my back. Severine did not stand and retreat, but neither did she reach out again with her electrodes. “You’re already dead,” I said, voice hushed. “I killed you, too. Siran and me. On Arae. I saw your corpse. Delivered it to Legion Intelligence. They probably dissected it, mapped your implants, turned you over to the Inquisition for disposal.” She was shaking her head as I spoke. “How many times have you died?” My own voice was raw in my ears. “I bet you’ve lost count.” I swayed a little and steadied myself with my hands. “But I bet you don’t remember any of them. Any of your deaths.” Kharn Sagara could not remember his deaths, either. He had not seen the Howling Dark nor passed through it, and neither had this woman. “You’ve never really died.”

I caught my voice trailing off, and I reflected on the face of the woman before me. She had the Mandari bronze coloring and the Mandari black hair, the Mandari high cheekbones with a touch of epicanthic folding about the eyes. Yet Severine was a Norman name, and many times I’d heard her curse in Jaddian. Had she been Jaddian once? Some immigrant girl in the Norman Expanse long ago? Was there anything left of the original girl in the woman before me?

“The Cielcin believe they are spirits trapped in this world,” I said. “You believe that we are nothing but matter. Data. Information.” I smiled up at her, realizing the game she was playing. “It’s the same delusion.”

She had nothing to say to that.

“You have no intention of saving me, even if you could,” I said. “You’ve no intention of rebuilding me. The minute you have my mind you’ll just . . . sift through it for what you want.”

The woman’s smile faltered. False indeed. I had no doubt that whatever model she might make of my consciousness she would keep only so long as it took for her to unravel the mystery of me. Far from saving me, she meant to keep a copy of me as a plaything, a slave, a puzzle to be solved.

“You want the truth?” I asked her, seeing no reason to lie. I looked her square in the face, finding renewed clarity in those moments free of pain. “Do you know of the Quiet, doctor?”

Severine’s face split, several emotions appearing at once. Confusion. Surprise. Contempt. A number of Severines crouched before me like refractions viewed through a prism. I tried and failed to hold my breath.

After so long suffering, I had forgotten what it was like to see.

Her face collapsed into confusion, the possibility made real. “The xenobites?” she asked. “They’re supposed to be extinct.”

“It’s not a xenobite,” I said. “The Quiet is something else.” The cold water splashed about me where I sat, ripples playing about the surface. “It changed me.” And remembering something Jari the Seer had said, I said, “Gave me eyes.” Though Jari’s vision had destroyed Jari itself. The Exalted had drunk of the waters of the Deeps, and the alien animalcule had hollowed him out, altered his brain and body chemistry, mutated him until even his human components were not human anymore.

And then I did something I had not done on my own in I could not guess how long.

I stood.

Water splashed about me as I rose, the heady confusion of my second sight pitching about me. I squinted against the sudden rush of vertigo, unsteady on my torn feet, water running from my soaked tunic and hair.

Still crouching before me—almost kneeling—the witch Severine looked up with iron eyes wide. “You can stand?”

It took every erg of energy I had not to topple forward. My legs shook, burned where the Cielcin had peeled them. I had to shut my eyes.

There are certain creatures who came with us out of Earth—insects and spiders who secreted themselves aboard our first, slow ships—who could stride across the surface of a pool and not sink as men do. They accomplished this by relying upon the elastic tension that binds the molecules of a fluid together. It was possible—if not probable—that a creature heavier than those spiders might do the same, possible that the laws of nature and nature’s God might stretch so far as to allow a man to stand upon the surface of the waters.

When first I returned out of the Dark beyond Death, I had seen the Quiet—walking in Gibson’s shape—standing upon the water, standing above the chaos of our world.

I could see it then! Dancing flame-like on the fringes of my vision. I had only to step toward it, to step up upon the waters and show this witch of MINOS just what the Quiet was. I had but to take that step.

And so I did.

And the whole world came crashing down, white pain lanced through my tormented shoulder, and a cry more animal than human echoed off the fangy roof of the cavern. It did not sound like my voice at all, but it had come from my throat.

I had been so sure. So sure.

Severine’s hands seized me, held my face from the water. “He’ll kill me if you die now,” she hissed, more to herself than to me. “What did you think you were doing?”

“Trying,” I said with terrible effort. “Trying. To show . . . you.”

“The Quiet,” Severine said, nails biting my face. “Where did you find them? They’re supposed to be extinct.”

My vision blurred, smeared her face across the blackness above me, eyes like points of polished metal. I opened my mouth, tried to answer her, but only a groan escaped me.

Severine hissed.

The pain stopped, vanished in a trice the moment after. Even the pain from my fall vanished, and I guess the collar was blocking even that. My head went clear for the first time in what felt like lifetimes, leaving only the crushing sense of tiredness, a bone-deep weariness beyond mere sensation.

Severine was looking down at me. “Answer me and I will leave you like this,” she said, fingers tracing the collar I wore. “Can you see the future?”

“The future?” I echoed her words, shook my head. “No. Not like you think. I remember time. Things that haven’t happened, or won’t. And things that might happen.” I tried not to think about the water, about how I failed. The vision was gone completely then, no possibility flickered on the edge of human sight. “If I try, I can choose what happens. Just for a moment.”

The witch blinked at me, gray eyes like the shutters of camera eyes. “The beam. On Berenike. You’re saying you can perceive the possible world states and . . . collapse the waveform how you choose?”

I told her I did not know, but her eyes grew wide. I know now. The ancient mystes teach us that—unobserved—light acts like a wave, that it is the eye of the beholder that collapses light into coherent beams of energy. So it is with all things. So it is that all conscious observers collapse the potential universe, condense reality, make history with their eyes. It is only that my eyes—my mind—sees more than other men.

“The Quiet did this to you?” Severine asked. “Tell me where you found them!”

“He found me,” I said at last, shaking my head.

That, evidently, was not the answer the witch desired, for the instant after I gave it, the pain returned. Not the numb ache of my countless injuries, not the bright fire from my fall, but the incandescent, roiling agony Urbaine had first inflicted on me. Through it all I felt her nails like talons on my face, heard her cold voice hiss. “Answer me, Marlowe!”

She let me fall then, let my face strike the water and the black stone beneath it. The water could not have been but inches deep, but lying on my face like I was, that was deep enough to kill me. Dimly I sensed a shape moving at my side, felt hands on me.

The pain had stopped, but the world was going dark. Through the splashing and the flood, I heard again the thunder of stamping feet and of truncheons hammering the ground.

“Teke! Teke! Tekeli!” cried inhuman voices, and “Aeta! Aeta! Aeta!”

I was lying on gray stone before an altar with iron rings fixed to it. At my back, the black dome rose, and in the distance I saw the gray-green blur of mountains, their faces sheer and smooth, angular as the fata morgana that castellate the sky.

“You knew it would come to this, kinsman,” the Prophet said, and pointed at the sky and at the great ship descending on tangled ribbons of cloud. “Time runs down.”

I screamed, coughed water and blood upon the stone.

“You are alive?” a rough voice asked me. I turned but slowly, found myself face to face with a human slave. One eye was missing, and his face was horribly scarred.

Severine was gone, and four Cielcin guards stood just inside the door.

“Severine . . .” I said, unsteadily. “Where?” I had to stop myself and coughed again, marking the signs of flaying in the ugly red stripes that decorated the man’s wiry arms. No light shone in his dark eyes.

“Gone,” the slave said. “She tried to kill you.”

I looked from the slave to the inhuman guards at the door. They must have heard the sounds of my fall into the water and rushed in to find Severine standing over me.

“Tried to kill me?” I echoed, still disoriented. Thinking of her offer to help me escape, I said, “Something like that . . .”